A Moment in Aging

I’m at the airport watching a woman be impatient with her much older mother. The woman in her wheelchair is struggling with her minds inability to grasp “all the things”. She is asking many questions. Her daughter struggles to meet the demands of her needs and her incessant inability to connect words to the neuropathways that have disappeared in the wake of times diminishing effect on her mind. This makes me sad as I digest it into my own self-involved process. One day I will be old, one day I may be sitting in an airport with my daughter driving her to a breaking point with my inability to recall the vivacious woman that I have been. I look at her and wonder who she danced with, was she ravaged in pleasure and loved hard by a man, by her children or by herself. I wonder if I am living as hard & as soft as I truly want to before my mind starts to leave me. Will I remember who I really am or be left in the playful oblivion of private dementia? Ageing is on my mind lately so of course, the great mother gently shows me that any resistance or efforts to hold onto what I deem an entitled luxury is only a momentary gift of a temporary incarnation. Then I think about my own mother and long to be in her lap, to have my head stroked by her wrinkled hand that mine now resembles, to crawl back into her womb and be born again, fresh, new and start this life overdoing it differently, better and with more love.